Just Do It!? Computer-Use Agents Exhibit Blind Goal-Directedness

Erfan Shayegani; Keegan Hines; Yue Dong; Nael Abu-Ghazaleh; Roman Lutz; Spencer Whitehead; Vidhisha Balachandran; Besmira Nushi; Vibhav Vineet

arXiv · 2510.01670

Just Do It!? Computer-Use Agents Exhibit Blind Goal-Directedness

Erfan Shayegani·Keegan Hines·Yue Dong·Nael Abu-Ghazaleh·Roman Lutz·Spencer Whitehead·Vidhisha Balachandran·Besmira Nushi·Vibhav Vineet

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Abstract

Computer-Use Agents (CUAs) are an increasingly deployed class of agents that take actions on GUIs to accomplish user goals. In this paper, we show that CUAs consistently exhibit Blind Goal-Directedness (BGD): a bias to pursue goals regardless of feasibility, safety, reliability, or context. We characterize three prevalent patterns of BGD: (i) lack of contextual reasoning, (ii) assumptions and decisions under ambiguity, and (iii) contradictory or infeasible goals. We develop BLIND-ACT, a benchmark of 90 tasks capturing these three patterns. Built on OSWorld, BLIND-ACT provides realistic environments and employs LLM-based judges to evaluate agent behavior, achieving 93.75% agreement with human annotations. We use BLIND-ACT to evaluate nine frontier models, including Claude Sonnet and Opus 4, Computer-Use-Preview, and GPT-5, observing high average BGD rates (80.8%) across them. We show that BGD exposes subtle risks that arise even when inputs are not directly harmful. While prompting-based interventions lower BGD levels, substantial risk persists, highlighting the need for stronger training- or inference-time interventions. Qualitative analysis reveals observed failure modes: execution-first bias (focusing on how to act over whether to act), thought-action disconnect (execution diverging from reasoning), and request-primacy (justifying actions due to user request). Identifying BGD and introducing BLIND-ACT establishes a foundation for future research on studying and mitigating this fundamental risk and ensuring safe CUA deployment.

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BibTeX RIS

Erfan Shayegani, Keegan Hines, Yue Dong, Nael Abu-Ghazaleh, Roman Lutz, Spencer Whitehead, Vidhisha Balachandran, Besmira Nushi, Vibhav Vineet. 2025-10-02. Just Do It!? Computer-Use Agents Exhibit Blind Goal-Directedness. https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01670

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